Most of the floppy drives should be supported by stock kernel (mine always were). External USB drives might be an exception - I haven't tested that yet. Module ''floppy'' is used as a drifer for floppy drives.

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Most of the floppy drives should be supported by stock kernel (mine always were). External USB drives might be an exception - I haven't tested that yet. Module ''floppy'' is used as a driver for floppy drives.

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$ locate floppy.ko

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/lib/modules/2.6.30-ARCH/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko

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$ pacman -Qo /lib/modules/2.6.30-ARCH/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko

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/lib/modules/2.6.30-ARCH/kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko is owned by kernel26 2.6.30.4-1

As you can see, it comes with the stock Arch kernel.

As you can see, it comes with the stock Arch kernel.

Revision as of 22:11, 6 September 2011

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason:please use the first argument of the template to provide a brief explanation. (Discuss in Talk:Floppy disks#)

Altough rarely used nowadays, one still might need/want to use a floppy disk (for example, I practice guitar to backing tracks played from my Yamaha keyboard, which has only a floppy disk drive interface). Common tasks with floppies are described bellow, with available tools to accomplish them.

Contents

Installation

Kernel module

Most of the floppy drives should be supported by stock kernel (mine always were). External USB drives might be an exception - I haven't tested that yet. Module floppy is used as a driver for floppy drives.

As you can see, it comes with the stock Arch kernel.

Module floppy is not loaded automatically by default for me. I load it manually each time I use floppy disk"

$ modprobe floppy

Packages

There are two packages in the Arch package repository I know of - dosfstools and mtools. Respective commands belong to these packages (grepped output of pacman -Ql dosfstools mtools):

Common tasks

Here are the commands needed to perform the most common tasks. In all examples, I suppose /dev/fd0 to be the linux device for the floppy drive. By default, all these tasks need to be performed as root (unless you use Sudo or something similar).